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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,107 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the things we adorn ourselves with. Previously: the grisly sides of perfume and angora.

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“There was once upon a time a very old woman, who lived with her flock of geese in a waste place among the mountains, and there had a little house,” begins The Goose Girl at the Well. Published by the Brothers Grimm, this strange little story describes a princess who comes to live with a poor crone in that wretched waste place after she fails her father’s Lear-like test to profess her love and devotion. The girl is lovely, as befits a fairy-tale princess — “white as snow, as rosy as apple-blossom, and her hair as radiant as sun-beams” — but there is one detail that always snags in my mind: “When she cried, not tears fell from her eyes, but pearls and jewels only.”

The rest of the story is a bit boring, I’m sorry to say. The girl returns home, the king learns his folly, and the old woman disappears into thin air, taking only the precious stones that fell from the girl’s magical tear ducts. But it ends on a funny note:

This much is certain, that the old woman was no witch, as people thought, but a wise woman who meant well. Very likely it was she who, at the princess’s birth, gave her the gift of weeping pearls instead of tears. That does not happen now-a-days, or else the poor would soon become rich.

I wish Grimm’s narrator had lived to see our world, one where pearls are so inexpensive that almost anyone can own a pearl necklace or a set of earrings. These gemstones are no longer precious, and they come neither from red-rimmed eyes nor from secret caverns in the ocean, but from underwater baskets strung together on sprawling sea-farms. Pearls were once mystical objects, believed by some to be the tears of Eve, by others to be the tears of Aphrodite. There are stories of pearls falling out of women’s mouths when they utter sweet words, and pearls appearing from the spray of sea foam as a goddess is born. Now we know better: pearls are made from some of the basic and common building blocks of nature — calcium, carbon, oxygen, arranged into calcium carbonate particles, bund together by organic proteins. They are created out of animal pain, which has been sublimated into something iridescent and smooth, layered and lovely. Born of irritation, these gemstones can be mass-produced and purchased with the click of a button. These gems, like so many things, have lost some of their luster thanks to the everyday degradation of value that comes with globalization and 24/7 access to consumer goods. Thanks to Amazon, you no longer need to plumb the depths of a river or visit a jeweler to purchase a set of freshwater pearl drops. With one-click ordering, you can have a pair of dangling ivory orbs delivered to your house within days — in some places, hours..

And yet: imagine opening an oyster and seeing that slimy amorphous lump of muscle, and nestled among it, a single pearl. The fact that such iridescent, shape-shifting beauty can come from a mucus-y mollusk remains something of a miracle, primal evidence that the world orients itself toward beauty. Or so I want to believe.

Read more…

Remembering Mark Hollis of Talk Talk

Mark Hollis of Talk Talk performs on stage at Vredenburg, Utrecht, Netherlands, 27th March 1986. Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns

Songwriter and Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis died in late February. He was 64. I would love to say that I knew the man’s work beyond the 1984 synth-laden hit “It’s My Life,” but like many people, that was not the case. Knowing how much extraordinary music is available to audiophiles, as yet unheard, can be a concern as much as a comfort. It’s wonderful when a new star appears in your musical horizon, but how many are yet to be seen? Anyway, it’s doubly sad when an artist’s death is what leads you to marvelous art.

I’ve spent the last week remedying the situation, listening to Talk Talk’s phenomenal last two albums, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. But it’s in writing about Mark Hollis’ only solo album that I choose to appreciate his legacy.

In retrospect, the 1998 album Mark Hollis was a final musical statement. It sounds like one anyway. Hollis used it to continue deconstructing the pop form that made him famous. If we give ourselves over to the album as a listener, we become travelers through its emotional topography, ultimately arriving at our preordained destination. Mark Hollis is a record of transition. Not transitional, moving from one form of expression to another, but rather describing a transition out of a state of being. At the time of the album’s release, Hollis was a father, and in interviews prioritized his familial, not professional, life. This is the record where that change takes place.

There’s been some talk about Hollis and his former band pioneering “post rock,” once a couple hit records freed him from financial constraints. Since music genres tend to be a critic’s constraint as much as a descriptor, I feel neither qualified nor motivated to talk about which musical basket is best to contain them. Talk Talk certainly made a remarkable, if unsellable, album with Spirit of Eden—an unusual use of a record label’s blank check—and then promptly stopped touring. Laughing Stock was fruit from the same orchard, and marked the close of the band’s career. The two albums certainly defied expectation, even as they pointed to a new form of expression.

Similarly, Mark Hollis is often beyond category: “The Colour of Spring” has a lyric piano which embodies composer Erik Satie’s simple melodicism; “Watershed”s muted trumpet and tubby string bass are an analog of the modal jazz of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue; the muttering woodwinds in “A Life (1895-1915)”—expressing themselves like intrusive thoughts—are reminiscent of Robert Wyatt’s 1974 progressive masterpiece Rock Bottom; and the asymmetrical drumming on “The Gift” predicts the polyrhythms of David Bowie’s swansong Blackstar.

Mark Hollis is delicate but durable, beguiling without needing to be catchy, sparse but harmonically dense, and occasionally dissonant even though it’s mostly unamplified. “The minute you work with just acoustic instruments,” Hollis said in a rare interview about the record, “by virtue of the fact that they’ve already existed for hundreds of years, they can’t date.”

“I wanted to make a record where you can’t hear when it has been made,” he said elsewhere.

The music on the album is intertwined with silence. It is powerful in its quietude. It starts with silence, then ambient sound of the outside world. The first note isn’t played for 20 seconds. Hollis sings, but not in the forward, mixed-loud way of a decade before: “[A]t times,” he said, “the voice is little more than a thin parting of the air in the studio; the words are stretched out, torn apart, boiled down to consonant acoustics.” What he sings are tone poems. The lyrics are imagistic, sparse. “Forget our fate,” he begins.

The pedlar sings

Set up to sell my soul

I’ve lived a life of wealth to bring

And yet I’ll gaze

The colour of spring

Immerse in that one moment

Left in love with everything

“We only used two microphones,” Hollis explained about the album’s production. “We searched a long time to find the right balance. We placed the musicians in different locations—that’s the way the sound and the resonance are built up. Recording in its purest form, really, like in the old days. To me the ultimate ambition is to make music that doesn’t have a use-by date, that goes beyond your own time.”

Hollis is referring to the way music was recorded before the advent of magnetic tape, which would allow for overdubbing, or recording other parts later on the same track. For the first half of the 20th century, songs and albums were cut “live,” with the full band playing for the entire take. No one could go back and add a part, since the performances were being committed to a wax cylinder or cut to a master disc. In many ways, these limitations are salutary: the musicians must play together, blending their dynamics. Once the “balance mix” was achieved—that is, the relative distance of instruments from the microphone, the loudest placed farther away—all that was left was the performance.

There’s another effect available only through a live recording with minimal miking: the listener is put into a physical space. Unlike a compilation of close-miked instruments arranged together to make a song, the contours of the room are communicated in a live recording. Listen to an old Louis Armstrong song. You can hear the room on his trumpet because his volume kept him away from the microphone. Hollis used this technique as well. It doesn’t just sound like a group of musicians playing together; it puts the listener in the space in which the music is being made. We are not so much hearing Mark Hollis as witnessing it.

“You’ve got the whole geography of sound within which all the instruments exist,” he said about the album. “If you listen hard enough, you can actually hear where my head’s moving in position as I’m singing. Because it does exist in a real room space.”

The cover of Mark Hollis is a photograph of a Sardinian Easter bread made to represent the Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God. “I like the way something appears to come out of his head,” Hollis told a Dutch interviewer in 1998. “It makes me think of a fountain of ideas. Also the manner how the eyes are positioned fascinates me. When I saw the picture for the first time I had to laugh, but there’s something very tragic about it at the same time.”  

“Behold the Lamb of God,” the apostle John said of Jesus, “which taketh away the sin of the world.” In the New Testament, Christ made himself a blood sacrifice to God—becoming the new Paschal Lamb—expiating the sins of future generations. Without lugging in the theological baggage, I think Hollis is making a similar offering on his self-titled album: sacrificing his pop star identity. “Come my love,” he sings on ‘Watershed,’ kick the line.”

Afield lies nothing but squalor to turn on

A song asale

Should have said so much

Makes it harder

The more you love

Gladdening eyes

Through slur

Emerge crucified

Hollis granted a few interviews to promote his solo album, but refused to tour in support of it. “There won’t be any gig,” he said, “not even at home in the living room. This material isn’t suited to play live. And I choose my family. Maybe others are capable of doing it, but I can’t go on tour and be a good dad at the same time.”

Westward Bound” points in this direction.

Opaline through her hair

Born on an April tide

Glowing in the wonder of our first child

There my promise is

 

A spur

A rein

 

 

Migrate

Job on the threshing line

Mute i walk

Idle ground

Westward bound

Pop stardom provides many wonders, but it demands much. Making more successful albums brings increased pressure to be even more successful. Getting better at touring only keeps you on the road. There’s an inherent rootlessness in belonging to the world. Mark Hollis gave us his last public statement, and then went to live the last two decades of his life as a husband and father. He made a choice that was right for him, even if it wasn’t the choice some of his fans wanted. What we are left with is Mark Hollis.

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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

What to Read After ‘Leaving Neverland’

Washington, DC. 5-14-1984 Michael Jackson with President Ronald Reagan and FIrst Lady Nancy Reagan at ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House where the President awarded "The King Of Pop" with the Presidential Public Safety Communication Award for allowing the song "Beat It" to be used in a public service campaign against teen drinking and driving. Credit: Mark Reinstein (Photo by Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

What struck me about Leaving Neverland, the harrowing, two-part, four-hour HBO documentary about Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck’s sexual abuse allegations against superstar performer Michael Jackson, is the mechanical similarity of the men’s stories. Almost play-by-play, their accounts of what happened, how they, along with their families, became dazzled and then ensnared in Jackson’s web, hauntingly mirror each other. I noticed the same thing while watching both Surviving R. Kelly and Kidnapped in Plain Sight — predatory techniques to woo most often follow a similarly uncreative, toxic formula. During Oprah’s follow-up interview special, Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed called the film a deep look into “what grooming child sexual abuse looks like.”

Unique to Robson’s and Safechuck’s dilemma is the sheer magnitude of their accused perpetrator’s fame. As Robson said to Oprah, “the grooming started long before we ever met him.” Michael Jackson entered the national spotlight as lead singer of the Jackson 5 in 1969. Thriller, from 1982, remains the second best selling album of all time in the US. After 50 years in entertainment, the reach and influence of Jackson’s music cannot be overstated: it is difficult to listen to any pop radio and not hear him in its melodies or harmonies, to watch any pop star dance and not see his movement in the shadows.

After a police investigation into allegations brought forth by then 13-year-old Jordan Chandler in 1993, Jackson wasn’t formally charged, and he was acquitted on multiple counts related to child sexual abuse in 2005. In both cases, he settled out of court with his accusers. Before his 2009 death, Jackson denied all allegations of misconduct. His estate and family have issued vehement denials in Leaving Neverland’s wake. Still, no one defending Jackson would go as far as to say he did not behave inappropriately with children: he admitted to some unconscionable behavior himself. Robson’s and Safechuck’s accounts are detailed, credible, and difficult to bear in one sitting. To make sense of the story, and to begin to make sense of how we, the public, fell short, a selection of readings follows, about Jackson, Leaving Neverland, geniusand the toxic cult of celebrity.

1. A Complete Timeline of the Michael Jackson Abuse Allegations. (Kyle McGovern, February 28, 2019, Vulture)

McGovern details every public allegation against Jackson dating back to 1993 — Robson and Safechuck appear and reappear multiple times among many other young men in Jackson’s orbit.

2. ‘Leaving Neverland’ Reveals the Monster We Didn’t Want to See in Michael Jackson. (Niela Orr, March 1, 2019, BuzzFeed)

Orr, a Jackson fan while growing up, says watching Leaving Neverland produced “the shock and pang of betrayal,” and was “a visceral reveal of insidious behavior.” She reckons with Jackson’s duality: the harmless childlike mythos versus his ability to shapeshift into monstrosity.

3. It’s Too Late to Cancel Michael Jackson. (Carl Wilson, February 27, 2019, Slate)

Wilson says Jackson, “was to modern popular music and dance what Dickens was to the Victorian novel” and ponders whether he is “too big to cancel.”

4. Michael Jackson Cast a Spell, ‘Leaving Neverland’ Breaks It. (Wesley Morris, February 27, 2019, New York Times)

I’ve stared at a lingering shot of a photograph of Jackson, who would have been around 30 and Safechuck who was about 9 or 10, and Jackson is beaming in sunglasses and a military jacket, flashing a peace sign, and James, in a too-big baseball cap, is turning to the camera, looking alarmingly ruminative for someone whose life should be rumination-free.

5. He’s Out of My Life: Letting Go of Michael Jackson. (Kierna Mayo, March 6, 2019, Afropunk)

Eye-spying racism should never be the reason we don’t call a predator by his name.

Mayo reckons with the denial and protectionism offered to Jackson and his memory by some in the black community.

6. ‘Leaving Neverland’ Asks an Uncomfortable Question: How Culpable Are the Parents? (EJ Dickson, March 4, 2019, Rolling Stone)

Some have interpreted Leaving Neverland and Abducted thusly, arguing that the parents of Jackson’s victims are just as culpable as Jackson in perpetuating the abuse. And to a degree, Robson and Safechuck seem to share that view: as Safechuck says, he has never fully forgiven his mother for allowing the abuse to continue. “Forgiveness is not a line you cross, it’s a road you take,” he said at the Sundance Festival earlier this year.

Yet Leaving Neverland and Abducted can be seen less indictments of bad parenting than as a condemnation of the cultural mechanisms that allow the individual power of personality to go unchecked. Even though Jackson was a pop superstar hailed as a musical genius, and Berchtold a small-town salesman and Mormon dad of five, both were, by all accounts, men who knew exactly how to wield their charisma as a weapon; both were highly skilled at disarming and seducing adults (in Berchtold’s case, literally) in order to gain access to their children.

Dickson teases out some of the similarities between Leaving Neverland and Netflix’s Abducted in Plain Sight.

7. She Wrote the Book on Michael Jackson. Now She Wishes it Said More. (Anna Silman, March 7, 2019, The Cut)

So if he is guilty — what do we do with the music? What do we do with Michael Jackson?
There are two aspects. One is what kind of restitution is needed. If it’s financial, that’s fine by me, but is that sufficient? I just don’t believe the art should be quote “banned” forever. But if banning, let’s say, R. Kelly’s work for a certain amount of time from the radio, is a way of getting money from his estate, to help give those girls and young women some kind of settlement, that’s absolutely fine with me. I feel the same way about the Jackson estate.

As for what we do with the music — that “we” splits into just millions of people, doesn’t it? There’s no one way to answer that. I got an email from an editor who just said in passing “My God, I’ve loved him all my life. I still do. Would I feel comfortable buying his videos or even his music around my 8 or 9-year-old child? Right now, no.” We’re all sifting through that.

The larger question with every one of these artists is how do we simultaneously keep in our heads and hearts this information and this material and at the same time continue to respond as we feel their art justifies. Those two processes aren’t mutually exclusive at all. And it’s going to keep happening so we need to start finding language and feelings as well as practical, legal ways of coping with it.

The Cut speaks to Margo Jefferson, author of On Michael Jackson, two days after she watched Leaving Neverland. 

8. No One Deserves as Much Power as Michael Jackson Had. (Craig Jenkins, March 1, 2019, Vulture)

It’s hard to explain the relationship between the superstars of the ’80s and their fans to people who weren’t alive or old enough to remember the decade. They were like demigods. They sang about love, peace, politics, and matters of planetary significance. Their art paused time and advanced culture. Their shows incited hysterics. It all seems religious in retrospect. Belief was the core of the bond, belief that these figures acted in the interest of bettering the world no matter the cost, belief that people who do good aregood. Their methods and their presentation were questioned, but the idea that pop stars were out to save the world was quite often taken at face value. This was not wise. We didn’t know any better.

More on the art and crimes of dangerous men:

How To Hide An Empire

Bettmann / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,528 words)

What do we think of when we think about the United States and the country’s history? This seemingly simple question rests at the heart of Northwestern University Professor Daniel Immerwahr’s new book, How To Hide An Empire. Immerwahr posits that, for the vast majority of people living in the contiguous United States, our understanding of our own country is fundamentally flawed. This is for one central reason: We omit the millions of people and large territorial holdings outside of the mainland that have, since the founding of the country, also had a claim to the flag.

In his book, Immerwahr traces US expansion from the days of Daniel Boone to our modern network of military bases, showing how the United States has always and in a variety of ways been an empire. As early as the 1830s, the United States was taking control of uninhabited islands; by 1898, the United States was having public debates about the merits of imperial power; by the end of World War II, the United States held jurisdiction over more people overseas — 135 million — than on the mainland — 132 million. While the exact overseas holdings and the standing of territories have shifted with time, what has not changed is the troubling way the mainland has ignored, obscured, or dismissed the rights of, atrocities committed against, and the humanity of the people living in these territories. When we see US history through the lens of these territories and peoples, the story looks markedly and often upsettingly different from what many people are told. Read more…

The Teen Idol Vanishes

Adam Scull / AP, Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,230 words)

Dylan McKay was never quite there. In the physical sense — he would kind of just turn up out of nowhere on Beverly Hills, 90210, in random staircases or under random cars, and disappear just as fast — but also, like, existentially. He was supposed to be a high schooler, but you could never imagine him in class, getting bored, learning. He seemed to know everything there was to know anyway, even though he was only 17 — but he wasn’t really 17. He had this sort of aged face, with the eyebrow scar, the never-ending stacks of lines on his forehead, the throwback pompadour, the Homeric sideburns, and seemed to have the sexual history of a middle-aged playboy. Depending on the circumstances, he exuded the hard-partying past of a retired rock star or the bodhisattva-like wisdom of an ancient yogi. Even though he had supposedly hit puberty only four years ago.

All of this resulted in an otherworldly, ageless icon of adolescence that was impossible to grasp completely because of the way it constantly vacillated between poles — old and young, violent and gentle, smart and goofy, rich and poor, public and private. But Dylan McKay’s was the kind of mythic narrative that could only float along on a dearth of details, the holes filled in by our imaginations. By a pubescent girl, for instance, who thought the “Dylan” in her new class would be something like the Dylan at West Beverly only to find he was as acne-ridden and awkward as she was because he was an actual teenager. As opposed to Luke Perry, a 24-year-old actor whose biography was so elusive that Dylan McKay stood in for him, turning both of them into this perennial abstract symbol of romantic teenage-hood. Read more…

If Only There Were Someone Who Would Listen

An engraved illustration image of the prophet Jeremiah lamenting over Jerusalem.

J.W. McCormack | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,167 words)

Imagine, if you can bear it, that we were sired and came of age in a world where all the works of antiquity had perished, leaving us with no Homerian sense of saga, no anguished Euripides or blood-spangled Oresteia, and few myths with which to orient ourselves. Now imagine we began to recover the Bible, and all its storied variants, book-by-book, in hastily translated installments, hot off the presses. Imagine a whole culture thrilling, for the first time, to the horrifying faith of Abraham at the binding of Isaac, chilled by the fate of Moses in the desert, riveted by the tearjerker hermeneutics of Job, and following the rise of the prophets as they struggle to maintain their faith in a fallen world like it was Dickens-at-his-peak or the Marvel Universe or Game of Thrones. Experiencing the original doorstop systems novel, we readers would be party to a renaissance in what story can and should be, our critical lenses refitted for new eyes through which to see the world. Of course, naysayers would argue that the planet and its creator are too seriously at odds for such an engagement with the substance of scripture. “The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly,” wrote Kierkegaard (expressing a sentiment I imagine could apply to more than just Christians). And one of Martin Buber’s inaugural assumptions in I and Thou is Mundus vult decipi, “the world wants to be deceived.”  Read more…

Shelved: Brian Wilson’s Adult/Child

Getty Images

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (3,519 words)

 

One day in 1976, Brian Wilson sat down at the piano in his Los Angeles home, turned on a tape recorder, and began to play. There’s a density to the introductory chords, like the air of an approaching storm. “Time for supper now,” he sings on the demo recording, the first verse so banal as to be almost exotic.

Day’s been hard and I’m so tired

I feel like eating now

Smell the kitchen now

Hear the maid whistle a tune

My thoughts are fleeting now

“Still I dream of it,” Wilson continues, his gutted voice not quite hitting the high note, “of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love. And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.”

The extraordinary chord progression, intricate melody, and anguished bridge all demonstrate “Still I Dream of It” to be a song written by a master songsmith, although one in decline. The confident tenor and soaring falsetto of Wilson’s youth are gone, and yet the song is somehow better for the ragged vulnerability. If you know about the life of the man leading up to this moment, the poignancy of this performance is almost unbearable.

“Still I Dream of It” was intended for inclusion on Adult/Child, a Beach Boys album that was immediately shelved upon recording. A bewildering mix of sublime and terrible songs, and a hodgepodge of arrangement approaches from big band to minimoog, Adult/Child is a bookend to the Beach Boys’ famously postponed 1967 opus, Smile. The first project documented a visionary at the height of his musical powers, unmoored by drugs and set adrift by overambition and a general lack of support; the second project is one of the final blows of that artist’s losing battle with his former self. What is most conspicuous about the period in between is Wilson’s absence.

Wilson showed an idiosyncratic musical genius from the start. “Brian took accordion lessons, on one of those little baby accordions, for six weeks,” his mother Audree told Rolling Stone in 1976. “And the teacher said, ‘I don’t think he’s reading. He just hears it once and plays the whole thing through perfectly.’” As a teenager, Wilson learned the complicated harmony parts of the Four Freshmen, teaching them to his younger brothers Carl and Dennis. The three formed a band called the Pendletones with cousin Mike Love and classmate Al Jardine. At Dennis’s suggestion, Wilson wrote songs about surfing and surf culture. Their first single, 1961’s “Surfin’,” and their ensuing demo, was popular enough to eventually get the band, now called the Beach Boys, a seven-year contract with Capitol Records.

Their first album, Surfin’ Safari, owed more to Chuck Berry than Dick Dale, whose reverb-soaked aggressive guitar instrumentals defined the surf music form. (“I wrote ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.,” Wilson recently said, “because of [Berry’s] ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’”) But the Beach Boys would not only go on to redefine surf music, they would fix the idea of Southern California in the national consciousness. Their music mapped this mythic place, fusing elements of early rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Much of this music originated in New York; Wilson’s early genius was to synthesize these musical elements and make a home for them on the other side of the country.

Beginning in 1963, two things happened in succession to solidify Wilson’s career path. The first was the release of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” Perhaps more than the song, Wilson was blown away by producer Phil Spector’s orchestrative approach. “That was when I started to design the experience to be a record rather than just a song,” Wilson remembered.  

The second momentous event in young Wilson’s life was the British Invasion, which pretty much killed off all other forms of popular music, including surf. To make things worse, the Beach Boys and the Beatles shared an American record label, who turned its attention from the former to the latter. Wilson wrote his last surf song in 1964, although Capitol Records continued to bill the band as “America’s Top Surfin’ Group.” By 1965, Wilson had produced and mostly composed 16 singles and nine albums for the Beach Boys.

Wilson stopped touring in 1965, concentrating on songwriting and producing. After hearing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, he was inspired to make his own “complete statement.” While the band toured, he worked for months on a project, using session musicians from collectively known as “the Wrecking Crew,” whose all-star players previously worked with Phil Spector. The resulting album, Pet Sounds, was released in 1966. Paul McCartney described one of its songs, “God Only Knows,” as the best ever written. “If you could just write maybe the bridge to ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ — that would be an accomplishment for most writers for a lifetime,” Al Jardine once reflected about another Pet Sounds track. “Just the bridge.”

Now considered a masterwork, Pet Sounds was not entirely well received by the band or their label. Mike Love, who once called it “Brian’s ego music,” found some of the lyrics “nauseating.” Capitol Records, alarmed at the $70,000 price tag — about $550,000 today — and realizing there weren’t any obvious singles on the record to help them recoup, stopped the recording and considered shelving the album. Wilson showed up at a tense record label meeting with a tape player. Instead of answering label questions, he instead played recordings of his own voice saying, “That’s a great idea,” “No, let’s not do that,” or “I think we should think about that. Rather than embracing the band’s new approach, the label put the record out in May 1966, then quickly compiled Best of the Beach Boys, releasing it less than two months later. The best-of easily outsold the new album. Brian Wilson was already in competition with nostalgia for an earlier version of his own band. He was 24.

Meanwhile, John Lennon and Paul McCartney liked Pet Sounds so much they made Beach Boy Bruce Johnston play it for them twice on a trip to London to promote the album. “I played it to John so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence,” McCartney said years later. “If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed [Sergeant Pepper]. And my influence was basically the Pet Sounds album. John was influenced by it, perhaps not as much as me.” (Wilson remembers Lennon calling him after hearing Pet Sounds and telling him it was “the greatest album ever made.”)

Already on a steady diet of amphetamines, marijuana, and hashish, Wilson began dropping LSD. “At first, my creativity increased more than I could believe,” he told The Guardian in 2011. “On the downside, it fucked my brain.”

Although hurt by the way Pet Sounds was treated, Wilson continued to evolve his production and recording process. Central to this approach was topping his previous effort. The result was one song recorded between February and September 1966 — a song that used more than 90 hours of tape and cost, in Wilson’s estimation, as much as the entire Pet Sounds project: “Good Vibrations.” In addition to arranging for cello, a theremin, and a bass harmonica, Wilson consciously used the recording studio as an instrument.

“‘Good Vibrations’ took six months to make,” Wilson told Rolling Stone. “We recorded the very first part of it at Gold Star Recording Studio, then we took it to a place called Western, then we went to Sunset Sound, then we went to Columbia. … Because we wanted to experiment with combining studio sounds. Every studio has its own marked sound. Using four different studios had a lot to do with the way the final record sounded.

“My mother used to tell me about vibrations,” Wilson continued. “I didn’t really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. It scared me, the word ‘vibrations.’ To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed, scared me to death. But she told about dogs that would bark at people and then not bark at others, that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see, but you can feel. And the same existed with people. … Because we wanted to explain that concept, plus we wanted to do something that was R&B but had a taste of modern, avant-garde R&B to it. ‘Good Vibrations’ was advanced rhythm and blues music.”

The song, and the ensuing record Smile, was written in pieces. “I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called ‘feels,’” Wilson said of this time. “Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.”

Although “Good Vibrations” topped the charts, Smile was never finished. Even in its incomplete state (a compilation of the dozens of sessions was issued in 2011), the project is monumental. At the time, Wilson said the result was going to be “a teenage symphony to God.” Already suffering from panic attacks, and now hearing voices in his head, Wilson had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the sessions. He began self-medicating with cocaine and heroin, ultimately being diagnosed as schizoaffective with mild manic depression. An almost complete lack of support from the band completed the bleak picture; Smile was abandoned in May 1967. “I had to destroy it before it destroyed me,” Wilson later said.

What followed for Wilson was a period of increasing indulgence and withdrawal. In the coming decade, he turned production duties over to his brother Carl, contributed fewer original songs to the band, and became known as a difficult recluse. He gained weight and increased his abuse of cigarettes and alcohol. The band toured and made records without him.

Wilson became completely withdrawn after the death of his father, Murry, in 1973. Theirs was a complicated, abusive relationship: Murry beat his children (purportedly causing Brian to go deaf in one ear), initially managed the band, and sold off much of his son’s publishing rights in 1969. “The story of my dad is the big can of worms,” Wilson wrote, “because it’s connected to everything else.” Wilson sequestered himself in the chauffeur’s quarters of his mansion and commenced a two-year period of orgiastic self-destruction.

Capitol Records released Endless Summer, another Beach Boys greatest hits compilation, in 1974. It went to Number 1. The Beach Boys, or at least the earlier, sunnier version of them, remained in demand, especially in the dark days of the Watergate era.

By now, Wilson’s reputation as the band’s guiding light had caught up with him. A 1969 contract with Reprise Records stipulated his involvement in every album. Now, without access to much of their former publishing revenue, the band needed a hit. The problem was that, by this time, Wilson was almost incapable of even getting out of bed. His wife and family hired radical therapist and former record PR man Eugene Landy in 1975.

Landy’s regiment was absolute: Wilson was surrounded by bodyguards in his own home, preventing him from doing drugs or overeating. Landy would dole out hamburgers or joints if Wilson was productive.

“Brian wanted to be left alone, but there was too much at stake,” the band’s manager, and Mike Love’s brother, Stephen Love once said. “If you’ve got an oil well, you don’t want it to wander off and become someone else’s oil well.” The label conceived of a new PR campaign, called “Brian’s Back” — Love even wrote a song with this title — which brought Wilson back on the road with the band for the first time since 1964.

 15 Big Ones, the first Beach Boys album to be solely produced by Brian Wilson since Wild Honey in 1967, was comprised mostly of covers. (Wilson blamed writer’s block, but he was working on a solo project of new material, tentatively called Brian Loves You.) The band’s version of Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music” gave them their first Top 10 since “Good Vibrations.” Critics rejected it. “The Beach Boys,” wrote one, “only succeed in jumping several steps sideways and 10 years back.”

Rolling Stone featured Wilson on the cover in 1976. The first interview, which took place in June, didn’t produce any useful material. “Brian was ready to talk, all right,” wrote correspondent David Felton, “just as he was ready to walk or ready to start dressing himself; but there could be no definitive Brian Wilson interview because Brian Wilson was not yet definitively himself.”

On the Rolling Stone cover, Wilson stood in the sand on a beach, surfboard in hand. Barefoot and wearing only a blue bathrobe, he appeared for all the world like an Old Testament prophet. The feature was called “The Healing of Brother Brian.”

Photographer Annie Leibovitz took the picture on Wilson’s 34th birthday. It took place during the filming of a clip for an upcoming TV special, called The Beach Boys: It’s OK, produced by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. In the skit, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd appear as “Surf Police” who force Wilson out of bed and onto the beach. Pounded by waves and, in one shot, using his board backwards, Wilson (who had never surfed before) was frightened by the ocean. In his bathrobe pocket was a folded piece of paper on which was written, “You will not drown. You will live. Signed, Dr. Landy.” (When Wilson made public appearances during this time, Landy would stand offstage, holding up cardboard signs reading “POSITIVE” and “SMILE” — the latter apparently written without irony.)

“He was not happy about it,” Michaels later remembered about the surfing scene. “It was almost a baptism.”

Though Wilson wrote and recorded the record mostly by himself, Brian Loves You was retitled The Beach Boys Love You and released in April 1977. Despite his desire to leave the group and go solo, Wilson realized he couldn’t. “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like a commodity in a stock market.”

“Once you’ve established yourself as an artist, a producer — somebody who has a style to say, something to say with a definite profound effect, you feel obligated to fulfill commitments,” he awkwardly told a BBC interviewer in 1976. “In other words, it’s an artist’s obligation to continue his, uh, constructive work — you know, his work. Any artist that you find has that feeling — he feels the need to please, you know. And it’s a very personal thing and it’s something that, uh, that you work on it. It’s something that comes … it’s natural. It’s a natural thing.”

Shortly after finishing the mixes for The Beach Boys Love You, Wilson began work on what would become Adult/Child. “[That] was Dr. Landy’s title,” Wilson wrote in I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir. “He meant that there were always two parts of a personality, always an adult who wants to be in charge and a child who wants to be cared for, always an adult who things he knows the rules and a child who is learning and testing the rules. I also thought about it in terms of family. I thought about my dad and me, and all the things he did that were good and bad, all the things that I can talk about easily and all the things I can’t talk about at all.”

“Still I Dream of It” was written for Frank Sinatra. “He didn’t say yes to the song,” Wilson wrote, “and that bothered me. It was a beautiful song about loneliness and hope.”

It’s strange to hear the 34-year-old Wilson sing from a teenager’s perspective. “When I was younger, mother told me Jesus loves the world,” Wilson sings in the bridge.

And if that’s true, then

Why hasn’t he helped me to find a girl?

Or find my world?

Till then I’m just a dreamer

Though jarring, this is the viewpoint Wilson returned to, as if the previous 15 years never happened. “We’ll make sweet lovin’ when the sun goes down,” Wilson sings in “Roller Skating Child” from The Beach Boys Love You. Hey Little Tomboy,” another track slated for inclusion on Adult/Child, extends this idea further, creating something that band biographer Peter Ames Carlin described as what “may be the most unsettling moment in the entire recorded history of the Beach Boys.”

Wilson called in arranger Dick Reynolds to help with Adult/Child. Reynolds originally worked with the Four Freshmen and collaborated with Sinatra in 1964, the same year he arranged The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album. Though Wilson claimed to want “a similar feel” as those classic Sinatra albums, the big band arrangements on Adult/Child are peculiarly lifeless. “Life is for the living,” Wilson sings with strangled enthusiasm over a high kick horn arrangement on the opening track.

I thought you wanted to see

How it could be

When you’re in shape and your head plugs into

Life

His last vocalization of “life!” is a harrowing shriek. Reportedly when Mike Love heard the album in the studio, he turned to Wilson and hissed, “What the fuck are you doing?” Love and Jardine’s vocals on the album were culled exclusively from earlier sessions; Wilson did most of the work alone, or with his brothers.

Adult/Child was shelved, by nearly unanimous consent. The band was nearing the end of their record contract with Warner/Reprise — who didn’t think the album had commercial potential anyway — and might have wanted to save some of the material for a major upcoming deal with CBS. Oddly, the only track from Adult/Child to be formally issued was “Hey Little Tomboy,” on the largely despised M.I.U., released in late 1978. “That album is an embarrassment to my life,” Dennis Wilson said tartly. “It should self-destruct.”

But it was his brother Brian who self-destructed more successfully. The voices in his head would multiply in the coming years, sounding by turns like his domineering father Murry, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, and others he doesn’t recognize. What they tell him is almost universally negative. Landy was fired in December 1976, but returned in the early 1980s after Wilson, 340 pounds and hooked on cocaine, overdosed. Landy ultimately began writing lyrics and, under their shared company Brains and Genius, claimed a 50 percent take of Wilson’s earnings. He “produced” Wilson’s 1988 solo record and is widely thought to have directed his first ghost-written autobiography — one which loudly sang Landy’s praises. Landy voluntarily surrendered his license in 1989, after being accused by the family of gross negligence.

The Beach Boys broke up for two weeks in late 1977. During a September meeting at Brian’s house, a settlement was negotiated which gave Mike Love control of Brian’s vote, allowing him and Al Jardine to outvote the other two Wilson brothers. The commercial, nostalgia-driven faction of the band advanced, while the experimental, vulnerable side receded.

Dennis Wilson, deeply addicted to alcohol, drowned in 1983. His 1976 solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, outsold the contemporary Beach Boys albums. “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys,” he once said. “He is the band. We’re his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.”

And this was true, at least for the few years until Brian Wilson became incapable and unwilling to fill the role. For a little while, at least, he was able to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney and Beatles’ producer George Martin at once: a gifted melodicist with a knack for hooks; an arranger of enormous sensitivities; and a producer able to employ even the studio as an instrument. It didn’t last because it couldn’t last: Every fire goes out after consuming all that sustains it. Especially those that burn brightest.

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker:  Samantha Schuyler

Fox & Friends in High Places

Bill Shine
Bill Shine, former co-president of Fox News, now director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

For The New Yorker, Jane Mayer chronicles how the revolving door of personnel between Fox News celebrities and the Trump administration has turned Fox into something like state TV and the White House into its one-trick ratings pony. (The trick is using fear as a business strategy.)

Mayer focuses on Bill Shine — the former co-president of Fox News and current director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House — and his well-documented history helping to create hostile workplaces as one of Roger Ailes‘s key enablers.

Shine led Fox News’ programming division for a dozen years, overseeing the morning and evening opinion shows, which collectively get the biggest ratings and define the network’s conservative brand. Straight news was not within his purview. In July, 2016, Roger Ailes, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Fox, was fired in the face of numerous allegations of chronic sexual harassment, and Shine became co-president. But within a year he, too, had been forced out, amid a second wave of sexual-harassment allegations, some of them against Fox’s biggest star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. Shine wasn’t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.

Shine, who has denied any wrongdoing, has kept a low profile at the White House, and rejects interview requests, including one from this magazine. But Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”

But at least four civil lawsuits against Fox have named Shine as a defendant for enabling workplace harassment. One of these cases, a stockholder lawsuit that Fox settled in 2017, for ninety million dollars, claimed that Ailes had “sexually harassed female employees and contributors with impunity for at least a decade” by surrounding himself “with loyalists”—including Shine. The suit faults Fox for spending fifty-five million dollars to settle such claims out of court.

The use of company funds for payoffs prompted a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan. In 2017, Shine was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, but instead he agreed to be interviewed by prosecutors. The criminal investigation seems to have been dropped after Ailes’s death, but Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”

Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.

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Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood

Historical Picture Archive / Corbis / Getty, Penguin Random House

Rae Nudson | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,277 words)

 

In Helen Oyeyemi’s books, reality can twist and bend until the distinction between what’s fantasy and what’s real disappears entirely. In previous novels, Oyeyemi takes familiar tales, like Bluebeard’s unlucky wives and Snow White’s unlucky youth, and breaks the well-known stories, putting them back together in new ways that jump through time and space. The result is always something weird, dark, and unfailingly interesting. Her latest book, Gingerbread, uses a well-known symbol from fairy tales, the eponymous dessert, rather than a tale itself to spark the story, one in which children take on adult responsibilities and come to experience the effects of work, capitalism, and the complexities of family.

Gingerbread is narrated with the help of a Greek chorus of dolls who come to life to hear the story that the gingerbread-maker Harriet is telling to her daughter Perdita about where Harriet came from — a place called Druhástrana that may or may not exist at all. While evidence of Druhástrana’s existence is scarce (it’s name translates to “the other side” in Czech), Harriet’s memories of growing up there are vivid.

It is during her childhood in Druhástrana that Harriet learns how to make gingerbread, a treat that provides sustenance to her family when times are hard and eventually provides a path to leaving Druhástrana behind — Harriet makes friends with a changeling named Gretel and moves to the city to work in a gingerbread factory, sending her wages home to her family. As she grows up, Harriet learns more about what’s true and what’s false and what matters in life. But one thing Harriet remains sure of is the quality of her gingerbread. She knows it’s good, and she knows that she can add value to the world through the treat she bakes. Read more…

Where the Trouble Started

Illustration by Hanna Barczyk

Saidee Sonnenberg | Longreads | March 2019 | 14 minutes (3,467 words)

 

“Your lips are like Brigitte Bardot’s.” He had one sweaty, shaking hand between my legs under my field hockey skirt and the other gripped tight on my ass, holding me to him. The alcohol that burned off him was suffocating. I could smell and taste it, and even at 11 I knew well the half-mast cast of those eyes and wasn’t sure who to hate more for the place I found myself, because surely I knew better than to trust those eyes. His hands dug deeper. “You know who that is?” he asked. He moved to kiss me but held himself in the almost of it — in the conflict of it. I hated the fear revealed by the sound I made to swallow the saliva over-pooled in my mouth from anxiety and threatening to drown me.

“No,” I pouted. I had been told I looked like Jean Seberg and sometimes Marlene Dietrich, which I thought was just wrong. I didn’t want what was happening, but I did want to know if Brigitte Bardot was beautiful. I wanted to know if he thought I was beautiful. It was a thrill I wouldn’t know how to stop chasing. I wanted to be famous, to be a star, even though I seemed to possess no obvious talents. But I wanted to be the center of something, and right there in that moment, I was.

No one was home. I’d let him in because he had gone out with my mom the night before and she seemed to like him a lot, even though he was married. He was going through a hard time. I heard her tell that to a friend on the phone. He came to the door with pizza and wanted to wait for her. I called around looking for her at various places but didn’t find her. My little brother was out somewhere too. I let the man in. It was my fault he was sitting at our dining room table and I was caught up in his hands like I was.

“Get me that book,” he said nodding to the shelf where the art books were. There was a big coffee table book of the silver screen. “I bet she’s in there.” He didn’t let go of me. He pulled me tighter to him, his face traveling around the front of my body to smell me. His smile was reptilian, it implored me to understand and pity his delight — like it couldn’t be helped. I pushed away and got the book. I could have not taken it to him, but then what? I understood how to look at a book with another person and maybe that was to be the end of it. I put it on the table and he told me to look her up in the index. One hand went back up my skirt and he used the other to pull me into his lap. I found her name as he rubbed my lips and the letters — all those Bs and Ts — stung me. I turned to the page where I would find her. He was hard against me. Brigitte Bardot’s face was not quite vacant but it was staring off in the distance at something unseen. I looked out there with her as he fumbled behind me.

Those are details burned in — the simple world splitting beginning of it — but I can’t remember what else happened that night, or how it ended. It is buried deep in my middle school psyche under layers of becoming a smoker, a drug user, and promiscuous.

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